


ride with diabolical things

by ennaih (aquandrian)



Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016), Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Ladyhawke Fusion, Angst, Bestiality, Crack Fic, F/M, Fae Krennic, Magic, and there is a little bit of porn, and very very dark, and yes unabashedly weird, harpy eagle Jyn, it's a Fae curse all right, so technically it's, the sword is back, white tiger Krennic, witch Jyn, yes that would be it
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-12
Updated: 2016-12-12
Packaged: 2018-09-08 03:25:16
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,546
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8828542
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aquandrian/pseuds/ennaih
Summary: She hunts a spell to turn them back. He hunts the Fae who did this to them.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Frost from Fire](https://archiveofourown.org/works/8309407) by [diadelphous](https://archiveofourown.org/users/diadelphous/pseuds/diadelphous). 



> So we got this most excellent Baudelaire quote as a prompt in the Jynnic Fandom Challenge, and [winterofherdiscontent made this glorious fanart of Lady Death Jyn and her grumpy white tiger Krennic](http://jynnicchallenge.tumblr.com/post/152043846759/winterofherdiscontent-graphite-pencil-plus), and said it was a Ladyhawke AU. And I stared at it with very round eyes and squeaked and then messaged her to ask if I could write fic to it and yes, there would be bestiality. And she very graciously said "yes, you may."
> 
> And so here we are. 
> 
> The idea to make it Fae was totally inspired by _Frost from Fire_ , diadelphous' submission to another prompt (mine) in the Jynnic Fandom Challenge, and which is wonderful.
> 
> Title from _Lovely Creature_ by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds.

Sunset tears them apart. 

She should be used to it by now but then sometimes she thinks there can never be anything mundane about this horror they’re trapped in. Every evening she flutters down with the dying sun, and the changes takes her, twists her out of the great feathered body -- it feels like she’s dying, wrenched from every earthly sensation, a terrible formless ecstasy. And by the time her bare feet touch the ground, toes curling into the dust, he is in his great white tiger form, stretching his massive front paws, the powerful striped back arching. He looks at her with the same longing blue eyes, and too often she goes to him, naked and crying a little, to put her arms around him, her tears soaking into his fur. 

But the truth is they have settled into this wrong routine as they move across the wide indifferent land. When she rubs her tears away and turns to find her shabby clothes, he leaves her some privacy and pads around their makeshift campsite, watching the shadows between the trees. She’ll talk to him as she cooks the meat procured during the day, glad for the opportunity to use her voice, telling him of the things she saw from the air. 

Sometimes they only stay long enough for her to eat, and continue travelling through the night. Sometimes she runs by his side, glad for the exertion of her limbs, the crisp night air on her face, through her tangled hair. Through the forests, darting around trees, she dodges and leaps fallen logs, following the bright shape of him in the blue darkness. And when she slows and stops, ready to sleep on a blanket on the cold ground, he leaves her, goes prowling across the fields and forests. He comes back in the early hours, damp with dew and smelling of blood. He is warm fur at her back, massive and sinewy, a resting menace that she cuddles up to and sighs.

During the day, he strokes her impossibly circled wings with his gloved hand, black leather on grey and white feathers, and she tears tiny strips of skin off him, little gouges on the side of his throat and on the line of his jaw. She takes down deer in the fields, her talons huge and merciless, and he laughs as he keeps pace with her, riding the great dark horse, wild and exhilarated. His white cape streams behind him, sleek white jacket and black leather trousers smooth on the strong taut muscles of his thighs, the long black scabbard and his high dark boots gleaming because he is still vain. She soars above his silver hair glinting in the sunshine, and circles around to his face lifted up to her, his smile cruel and beautiful.

They move through the wild country and the little towns, seeking signs, tracking the magic. The villagers recoil at his beauty, know instinctively that he is not like them. From her perch on his wrist, she turns her bold white head and sees the way some racial memory stirs in the back of their mind. Humans remember the cruelty of the Fae even if they can’t articulate their recognition. They may reluctantly give him information or food or some money in exchange for things scavenged along the way. They might even give him shelter in a stormy night but it’s always far from their homes and their children, some stable or backroom in a pub. She is the one they talk to, invite to their dinner table, and fuss over by the hearth. While he’s out in the woods, she mixes up the poultices and deals out the herb magic and common sense, helping where she can, if only to remind herself of her own humanity.

When they have money enough for a night in a cottage, he comes back at the time she’s having a bath, sits and licks his huge front paws by the long tin tub in the flickering candlelight. And she’ll lift her languid wet hand to stroke down his nape, and murmur to him of all the people she’s met and talked to that evening. 

But more often she has to bathe in cold rivers by the light of the silver moon. Then he raises his head to watch her with glittering blue eyes as she comes out of the water, drying her hair, her naked body all slender and white in the moonlight. Then sometimes she lies on the grassy bank and spreads her legs for his broad long tongue, warm and nubbly. He licks her carefully, his great head resting on her thighs. She moans and writhes against the grass, wanting the weight of him on her, wanting to tear the world apart with their wrong desire.

They fuck with her under him on all fours, his weight massive and held on his spread claws digging into the dirt. His cock is barbed on the end, tiny spines tearing at her insides but she always heals by the time the sun rises, by the time she takes to the skies, always wondering if his seed will take root inside her, always wondering what sort of fey terrible child they could make.

The Fae they do encounter in their search invariably try to kill them, traitors to the last. They go down to her talons and cruel beak, to the poisoned edge of his sword blade. She doesn’t say it but she knows that they are steadily exterminating his species, and he is murderously gleeful about it, complicit in this, a traitor himself. But when she swoops down after each skirmish to his bloodied glove and allows him to nuzzle the proud white crest feathers, she knows he is ever loyal to her, that they will decimate both living worlds for this thing done to them.

For a long while, they assume it was purely a Fae curse, the work of some malicious former ally or relative or lover of his from the Winter Court. But the more she talks to the hedge witches, those clever women with their sharp eyes and capable fingers, the more she learns of her own craft, she begins to suspect her own kind. And eventually as they circle around to her hometown, a plan forms in her mind.

She tells him the night they make camp in the forest outside the village. He listens with alert blue eyes, huge and pale lashed, all his attention fixed on her face. And when she gets to the crucial bit, the murderous rage moves like lightning through him. She puts out a hand, her voice sharp. “Wait. Yes, we’ll do it tonight but not yet, not just yet. Wait a while til the moon rises, til they’ve gone to bed.” He quivers, the powerful tail lashing slow on the ground, and moves into her touch. “Soon,” she promises him, ice in her heart, flame in her mind, as she presses her lips against the white marked fur of his brow. “We’ll make it right soon.”

Making it right is her childhood home erupting in a white hot fire, is the sight of her parents darting out, wild eyed and panicked, and stopping short at the sight of her and her lover standing outside the low burning fence. She in black and grey, a lithe young woman with her hand on the back of a snarling great white tiger.

Her father is the first to plead, to reach out his hand and try reason with her. But she looks right past him at her silent watchful mother, at the crystal glimmering on that neck.

“You know what you did,” she says, cold and composed.

“Yes,” her mother replies, stepping forward. “And you know why.”

Jyn Erso curls her hand in striped fur. “We chose each other, he and I. You had no right to interfere, no right to pass judgement on us.” 

Her mother looks at the steadily growling shape of her Fae lover. “If you kill us, the curse will stay unbroken.” She glances back at Jyn. “Is that what you want?”

“No, wait,” her father interrupts. “There has to be a way -- Lyra, speak to her. Lyra, apologise. It was wrong, we knew that -- Lyra --”

But she is her mother’s daughter and she knows. Lyra Erso will not flinch from her principles. 

The white fire of the house mushrooms out, turning all the shadows a ringing red. And red is the blood dripping from the jaws of the white tiger as they leave the burning past behind them.

She’ll find a way to break the curse eventually. It may take them several more years, so much more wandering beyond the living realms. Maybe he’ll find it with her, his Fae magic melding with her natural craft in precisely the way her mother and the Winter Court feared. Maybe they’ll find a way to control these shapes, to move between them at will. She sees it as they walk away, an image that shimmers before them -- the two of them changing and changing -- human into harpy eagle, faerie into tiger, eagle into woman, tiger into man, walking forever into the bright white future, never to be torn apart.

**Author's Note:**

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> art by winterofherdiscontent
> 
> Yeah, I didn't know it was going to turn out that dark, or that holy fuck, Lyra did the thing. But woah, okay. 
> 
> And yes, this owes quite a lot to Lords and Ladies by Terry Pratchett cos everything I know about everything I learnt from Pratchett.


End file.
